Spiritual Traditions at the Roots of Western Civilization

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Concerning The Logos

The Greek word -- transliterated logos -- which was used by John in the prologue to his gospel, is often translated as word. Taken literally, that meaning is problematic, for how could a mere word exist from the beginning of time? How could a word be God? And how could such a word become human, in particular, the man, Jesus Christ? To properly understand John's prologue and, in fact, to fully understand his gospel and the whole New Testament, one must know something of the interpretation a literate, first century citizen of the Roman Empire -- one thoroughly steeped in Greek philosophy and culture -- would attach to the term.

Literally, logos, did mean word. It could also mean utterance, speech, logic, or reason, to name but a few. Heraclitus of Ephesus, who lived in the sixth century, BC, was the first philosopher we know of to give logos a philosophical or theological interpretation. Heraclitus might in fact be called the first western philosopher, for his writings were perhaps the first to set forth a coherent system of thought akin to what we now term philosophy. Although his writings are preserved only in fragments quoted in the writings of others, we know that he described an elaborate system touching on the ubiquity of change, the dynamic interplay of opposites, and a profound unity of things. The Logos seemed to figure heavily in his thought and he described it as a universal, underlying principle, through which all things come to pass and in which all things share.

This notion of The Logos was further developed by Stoic philosophers over the next few centuries. The Stoics spoke of The Logos as the Seminal Reason, through which all things came to be, by which all things were ordered, and to which all things returned.

Perhaps the most extensive accounting of The Logos was by Philo of Alexandria, a Hellenistic Jew who lived around the time of Christ. Philo wrote allegories of Old Testament books authored by Moses, interpreting them in the light of Greek philosophy. He used the term, logos,refer more than 1300 times in his writings, in many varied ways. Of particular note are his references to The Logos as the Divine Reason, by participation in which humans are rational; the model of the universe; the superintendent or governor of the universe; and the first-born son of God. Although there is no direct evidence that John ever even read Philo, it seems clear that the concepts he articulated were firmly in the mind of the evangelist when he wrote his gospel.

The understanding of The Logos by an intended reader of the prologue to the fourth gospel may be summarized as follows.

The Logos is
If it is true that there is a single, unifying principle eternally at work in the universe, through which all things come into being and by which all things are ordered, one would expect that it would be attested to by other sources. That is in fact the case. For example, in The Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote of such a principle he called the tao, or 'the way of life'. In the Upanishads, ancient Hindu philosophers wrote of the ultimate reality and called it Brahman, which is manifested in the individual as Atman, much as The Logos manifests itself in the individual human's intellect or reason. Today, modern physicists acknowledge a single, fundamental principle of the universe and seek to articulate it in the form of a complete, unified theory of physics.

I believe that these sources reflect a valid yet severely limited comprehension of The Logos. A more complete understanding comes from recognizing, as John states in his gospel, that The Logos became flesh at a particular time in history: about 4 BC; in a particular place: Palestine; as a particular man: Jesus Christ; and for a particular purpose: to reconcile humankind with God through his human life, death, and resurrection.
 
"The Air-Lass tumbled in the waves, her belly hard with the coming birth of the first bard, tumbled in the waves of the waters. Tumbled for 30 years, hard bellied. Tumbled in the waters."

"A small bird appeared over the Air-Lass in the waters, looking for a place to land. The Air-Lass lifted her knee. The bird landed, grateful."

"The bird laid nine metal eggs: eight iron, one gold. Three hatched. The Air-Lass moved and the other eggs fell into the water. One cracked open. The yellow became the sun. The white became the moon. The bottom half shell became the earth. The top half shell became the sky."
-The Kalevala


 
"The Air-Lass tumbled in the waves, her belly hard with the coming birth of the first bard, tumbled in the waves of the waters. Tumbled for 30 years, hard bellied. Tumbled in the waters."

"A small bird appeared over the Air-Lass in the waters, looking for a place to land. The Air-Lass lifted her knee. The bird landed, grateful."

"The bird laid nine metal eggs: eight iron, one gold. Three hatched. The Air-Lass moved and the other eggs fell into the water. One cracked open. The yellow became the sun. The white became the moon. The bottom half shell became the earth. The top half shell became the sky."
-The Kalevala


Ah forgot the link, want to make sure it's seen:

The Power Of Finland's 'Kalevala'

For these past 10,000 years an oral tradition of folk tales and songs called theKalevala has been kept alive by the people. Generation after generation the Finns sat knee to knee, facing one another, hand holding hand, next to the fire, rocking, telling the tales. For 10,000 years.

The Kalevala was written down in the 19th century. The songs, still sung, had laid the groundwork for a masterpiece similar in its gestation to Homer's Illiad and Odyssey.Just as Homer's works transformed Greek oral tradition into a written form, into literature, so too the Kalevala became literature read by all Finns in high school.
 
Gary Lachman - The Secret Teachers of the Western World

Gary Lachman discusses his latest book The Secret Teachers of the Western World. This epic study unveils the esoteric masters who have covertly impacted the intellectual development of the West. Running alongside the mainstream of Western intellectual history there is another current which, in a very real sense, should take pride of place, but which for the last few centuries has occupied a shadowy, inferior position, somewhere underground. In this clarifying, accessible, and fascinating study, Lachman explores the Western esoteric tradition as a thought movement with ancient roots and modern expressions, which, in a broad sense, regards the cosmos as a living, spiritual, meaningful being and humankind as having a unique obligation and responsibility within it. This is in stark contrast to much of modern science, which sees the universe as a meaningless flow of matter and energy, and human beings as pointless accidents.
 
The ‘Greek Thing’: the evocation of untranslatability in Roberto Calasso’s “The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony”

In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso introduces mythological objects (characters, gestures, things) in his story-telling narrative which he re-interprets in terms of references to non-mythological texts. Because the features and function of myth differ so greatly from the characteristics of the philosophical, etymological, historical, and other kinds of texts which interpret them, it is appropriate to consider this a translation from the language of mythology into the language of non-mythology. According to Juri Lotman, the complex relationships between translatable and untranslatable elements of incommensurable systems generate the conditions for meaning generation. Because of the vast distance between mythological and non-mythological languages, there is a large degree of mutual untranslatability as well as a great potential for the generation of new meanings. Calasso’s book is an effort to translate the untranslatable which succeeds in its primary task of modeling the distant and unfamiliar world of mythology in language comprehensible to modern western culture, while resisting the tendency to make direct equivalences between the two incommensurable systems. Calasso effects this by bringing together mythical and non-mythical elements into tropic relationships, rendering at once their semantic equivalences and the untranslatable aspects which make the juxtaposition meaningful.
 
Benandanti

Literally, "the Good-Walkers." Pagan or Christo-Pagan Witches of northern Italy.

The Benandanti appear in a series of 16th century trials run by the Italian Inquisition. They were village healers, specializing in cures, charms, and divining the names of "black" Witches who had cursed people. Interestingly, the Benandanti did not consider themselves Witches. They drew sharp distinctions between themselves and the "evil" Strega, or Witches, who they claimed harmed people.

Benandanti were generally born, not made. A child who was born with a caul (fetal membrane) across his or her face was destined to become a Benandante. As an adult, the child's spirit would begin to leave his body during the Ember Days (quarterly periods of fasting in the Catholic Church). Oftentimes the soul left their body in the shape of a small animal, such as a butterfly or mouse.

In this spiritual form, the Benandanti performed sacred tasks. Usually men met in the fields and banded together to fight against the Strega, who attempted to blight the crops. They fought with fennel stalks, while the Witches held sorghum blades. If the Witches won the battle, the crops withered and the village starved. A victory by the Benandanti assured a year of plenty.

Female Benandanti normally had other duties. When they left their bodies, they travelled to meet a Goddess, called a variety of names like Abundia or Irodiana. This Goddess led a procession of spirits, animals, and fairies. Benandanti could join Her travels and learn which villagers were going to die in the upcoming year.

The Benandanti came to the attention of the Inquisition in the late 16th century. (See Paolo Gasparutto's biography for one of the earliest trials) The Inquisition discouraged these "Pagan" beliefs sharply, but did not kill any of the Benandanti. However, under pressure from the Inquisition, the Benandanti began to reinterpret their old beliefs. They drew sharper and sharper lines between themselves and the Witches. Originally the Strega were seen as semi-honorable enemies. As the Inquisition stressed the horrid things Witches did throughout Europe, the Benandanti began to condemn Witches more harshly. In the early trials, almost none of the stereotypes about Witches appear; the later trials are full of them.

The Benandanti appear to have died out in the 17th century. As the trials continued, people began to confuse the "evil" Witches with the "good" Benandanti. To reclaim their "good" reputation, the Benandanti emphasized how evil the Witches were, and spread many tales about the horrors they inflicted on the village (horrors, I might add, that only the Benandanti could save the villagers from). They also began to accuse Witches aggressively. But their attempts to focus hostility on Strega, not themselves, back-fired. The Inquisition usually ignored their accusations, and the villagers were incensed at the discord and strife the Benandanti caused by accusing other villagers of Witchcraft. Their reputation fell further, and they disappear from our records within a century or so of their first trials.

Were the Benandanti Pagans? Many modern Pagans would say yes, since they communed with the Goddess Irodiana. But the Benandanti considered themselves good Christians. When an inquisitor snarled that it was not Christian to fight for the crops, one confused Benandante responded, "Why would God want the crops to fail?" Some said that God called them to their duties, and none appear to have had problems honoring both Irodiana and the Christian God. When the Inquisition insisted that you could not do both, many Benandanti gradually came to believe that they were not Christians. But the ones who did assumed that that made them Satanists, not Pagans. They abandonned their earlier beliefs and were reconciled to the Catholic Church.

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Platonically irrational

It’s rare that contemporary discussions of cognitive biases flow directly into conversations on ethics, pleasure and pain, and the best way to live one’s life. But ancient philosophy did not compartmentalise what are now cloistered academic fields. Plato understood that susceptibility to distorted reasoning was a matter of ethics as well as psychology. This does not mean anything as simple as ‘bad people are more vulnerable to cognitive biases’. But consider his diagnosis of misanthropy and other sampling errors, which stem from ‘the too great confidence of inexperience’. In the Apology, Socrates claims to be wiser than other men only because he knows that which he does not know. When Kahneman writes that we are ‘blind to our blindness’, he is reviving the Socratic idea that wisdom consists in seeing one’s blindness: knowing what you do not know.

Intellectual humility and overconfidence can stem from purely cognitive processes, but they are also correctly understood as moral achievements or failings. Someone who always thinks that he is right about everything, however little he knows, is making a moral as well as a mental mistake. Similarly, the cultivation of intellectual humility is, in part, the cultivation of an ethical virtue. Many of the early Socratic dialogues end in uncertainty: the characters are reduced to what in ancient Greek was called aporia, and is often rendered in English as ‘perplexity’, ‘bafflement’, or ‘confusion’. Socrates’ interlocutors search for a satisfying answer to some question only to find that every proposed answer fails to satisfy tests of logical consistency. Characters react in different ways to this process – some become flustered, some threaten violence, some run away, and a few recognise that they have been improved, and express gratitude to Socrates. Their false steps in the arguments dramatise errors in reasoning, but their emotional reactions are the stuff of literature: they reveal hubris and arrogance, modesty and generosity, and the dynamic struggles between these opposed impulses – what the novelist William Faulkner in 1950 called ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’.

By dramatising the moral dimensions of cognitive biases, Plato suggests that, while susceptibility to these errors could be universal, our capacity to overcome them stems in part from the correct ethical training. Socrates might have endorsed precisely half of the poet John Keats’s lovely praise for the value of ‘being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’. This is only a preliminary step in Plato’s dialogues – a (good-natured) reaching after fact and reason should and does occur – but an initial tolerance of uncertainty is a capacity without which individuals and societies cannot adequately self-correct and improve. People who are pained and irritated by not knowing something reach prematurely for whatever apparent reasons are most accessible.

In one ancient demonstration of what Kahneman calls the availability heuristic, the character of Euthyphro defines piety as exactly what he has done immediately before beginning his conversation with Socrates. Because this is the first example that comes to mind, Euthyphro naturally offers his own behaviour as a paradigm case of piety – the concept that the dialogue investigates. Consider the difference between saying ‘I am doing X because it is right’ and ‘X is right because I am doing it’. Euthyphro unwittingly falls into the trap of the latter while believing he is doing the former. Plato suggests that a remedy for this tendency must involve changing what gives us pleasure and pain – lessening the pain associated with uncertainty or decreasing the pleasure derived from proving that one is right. These are ethical challenges as much as intellectual ones.

In
 
"Intellectual humility and overconfidence can stem from purely cognitive processes, but they are also correctly understood as moral achievements or failings. Someone who always thinks that he is right about everything, however little he knows, is making a moral as well as a mental mistake. Similarly, the cultivation of intellectual humility is, in part, the cultivation of an ethical virtue."

I like this, but also in many spiritual traditions there is a practical requirement of humility for learning. If you think you already know everything, then there is nothing for you to learn. The cup has to be somewhat empty to receive.

The "end of science" or "end of history" types seem profoundly ignorant of their ignorance and unknown unknowns.
 
Famous Italian film director Roberto Rossellini (1906-1977) made a number of television films based on significant historical intellectual figures at the end of his life (late 60s, early 70s), most of them with a philosophical or religious dimension (Descartes, Augustine, Pascal). Here's the very good Socrates (English subtitles can be turned on). It's not available anymore on DVD (with subtitles), so good to find it here:
 
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